what a load of options both simple and complex here on the table, i just hope if any last changes are to be made that they are done by tomorrow's day-end seeing as thats one week before the tourney day.

Probably just put a few people in charge of deciding this, not the whole tournament. Maybe just the expert people plus Laura Tony and KDDR? I'm sure we'll have a pretty decent consensus if a problem song were to arise anyway.


I still think it will give a better seeding to just pick a few songs, dunno what's so difficult or undesirable about that. If we put up the list now, people still have time to play them all. As-is I keep hearing about people panicking to now play all of ITG 1/2 and it will literally take 30 seconds to just pick songs. Tony's post regarding Randoms instills better faith in it than I had before because he makes good points, but I still think a list in advance would be far more preferable to most people.

I just kind of caught this also; it should have been mentioned long ago but I think now would be better than never:

The difference in points between Marvelous and Perfect really shouldn't be the same as the difference between Great and Perfect. Imagine 5m 5g versus 9p 1g. I would argue the 9p 1g should be a better score than 5 greats in 10 steps (which wouldn't even be a AA, or even a B for that matter I think), but they have the same value in "Kevin Points". Or on a larger scale, imagine 200 marvelous, 50 perfect, 5 greats versus 205 marvelous, 40 perfects, 10 greats. The fewer greats should plainly win, but they would tie by this system. This is supported by the fact that the difference in timing windows is far different between Marvelous and Perfect compared to Perfect and Great.


I really don't mean to poke holes in this a week in advance, but I hadn't really looked at the rules for the SN2 tournament and this seems like something that could cause major problems. If you're going to use "Kevin Points" like this make it
Marvelous 5 pts
Perfect 4 pts
Great 2 pts
OK 2 pts
Or something similar to preserve more healthy ratios

Gerrak, I'm pretty sure the point of the Kevin Point system is to artificially place emphasis on Marvelous Attack by penalizing players a disproportionate amount for Perfects without just straight up saying "Marvelouses are worth a point and nothing else is worth anything."  It's not a standard ruleset by any means, but I think that was the point; it's kind of like how a couple of years ago, most of the ITG community could be reasonably expected to do 10s, but now it's 12s - DDR players have nothing to do but refine their timing, so now he's trying to up that difficulty.

It's sort of like how some DDR tournaments gave you two points for a perfect, one for a great, 0 for a good, -6 for a boo, -8 for a miss, etc, whereas others calculated based on straight number of perfects.  The first tournament style was structured to emphasize comboing (this was back when people thought that was hard, mind you) whereas the second tournament style was meant to emphasize precise timing.  They definitely tested different things, but neither was really unfair; if you were really good at the game, you could win any format by AAAing the song.

The only completely fair method for me is to have no one pick the qualifiers. I think Laura's idea is good, however, so I'll be implementing that as well. I must mention that you will only be able to participate in the qualifier veto process if you're there on time at 11am, when qualifiers are scheduled to start.

There's one last issue to be resolved: the prizes, and the potential for donation to charity. Per Bill's instructions, I am not going to be able to find out about this until the day of the tournament. There is nothing I can do about that.

Also, I should mention that we really have to scram by about 8pm. Masterman Vending can't be sending people out any later than that to lock up the cabinets. While I really doubt that the tournament will run that late, please do be on time to everything, as this will greatly speed things up.

Laura's also right about the Kevin Point system. It's just an experimental rule set that I'm trying out, mostly to do Marvelous Attack without completely devaluing perfects.

If you haven't played all of ITG1 and 2 by now...well...the game's been out 5 years, I feel like we've hit the point where it's not necessary to assume that people haven't played it to death.

A little bit off topic, but for those that are concerned about out of state players joining the tournament (Flash in particular) I can confirm that he won't be attending.

"Nope, I haven't really been interested in any tournament play lately for some reason. I'll prob make my return to tournaments at fr5." -Flash

Anyways, carry on!

Don't get me wrong, I get a lot of marvelouses and lots of greats and no perfects, so this ruleset benefits me, I was just stating its blatant lack of reasonability, considering 90% of the tournament entrants don't stomp the holy god out of DDR for Marvelouses.

Also
This speaks to how little you know the current players. Only a few of us have been around for more than a couple years and have played through all of it; probably fewer than 5 people (all of them in expert division) have played through all of ITG 1/2, the standard division are fairly new players and this random song will inherently screw a lot of them up. But as Tony stated, with two songs its fairly unlikely both will favor one person in the same way.

Still I have to point out the blatant flaws in both systems. One of these days you'll all realize I ain't typing the day away for me, I'm doing it for everyone else who's not perceptive enough to extrapolate the potential consequences from each aspect of the ruleset or isn't here to speak for themselves.
You have completely devalued perfects. Marvelouses are devalued with the SN2 scoring system, I agree, that's why I suggested 5/4/2 rather than 3/2/1. This would provide much more of a reasonable MA without making getting greats not matter at all. But hey it's not like I'm a mathematician who thinks about this stuff.

But minus this change, you'll get plenty of complaints day-of when this 50g 0p 100m B guy ties the 0g 100p 50m AAA guy, so I'm not so worried about grilling you about it now.


Again, you keep making rules that benefit me, so thanks I suppose, I just don't see how they're remotely fair for 75% of the other entrants.

Sorry to split hairs, but completely devaluing perfects would be making them the same as greats or just doing Marv = 1, everything else = 0.  This system does greatly deemphasize perfects, though. 

I MA.  You MA.  James MAs.  Tony MAs.  There are plenty of people who are good at getting a whole lot of Marvelouses.  I don't think there will be any complaints day of because I think the only people entering this tournament are people who like to practice MA anyway; it's not the main draw of this event, ITG is, and is mostly a consolation meant for players like me with strong timing and poor stamina. 

Looking forward to seeing you guys in action at this thing, although glancing at the thread makes me glad I'm not a competitive player. Best of luck to all participants and remember to have fun!

Don't mind us... Sometimes we go "I HATE EVERYBODY" on the forums and kill each other with our terrible derogatory statements, but we get mostly along in person Believe it or not I'm not totally an asshole in real life. Weird huh...

I can vouch for that. Gerrak is as ass on the forums but not when hanging out. (Not sure why, but it's true.)

12 hours away 

Been training a long time for this, as many others have too. See you guys there.

Okay guys. Time to sleep now. Pads are working well at Acme, and I'm looking forward to the tournament tomorrow. See you guys there!

Bill was nice enough to crank up the ITG3's volume a smidge upon request tonight for the tournament.

I shall bring my video cam to at least document the finals (but hopefully more). Hope to see a lot of y'all in 9 hours or so.

I can't wait to get my butt kicked today!!!!

Awesome tournament Yeah it ran until a little late but that's with a 7th person in the round robin, and running 3 different divisions.

Quick Congrats & Thanks:

James- that was the first time I ever seen you play, but you really killed that DDR tournament and got very close in the itg expert one also. Awesome work.

Tony- p.s. are you ancsik? You persevered real well to make it through to win twice in the finals, it was good facing off against you in the round we competed, hopefully we'll match up again sometime. But really good job on winning!

Allan- you trained really hard for this one, (at acme and at the gym), that's something i also do for this game. You really showed a good strategic and competitive edge, that was real cool to see and you deserved it.

KDDR- Thanks for putting this one on for us, there was ALOT of debate setting up the divisions, but the tourney itself brought alot of people together and was a lot of fun.

and to everyone else I met and got to talk to a good deal at the tourney, I'll be seeing you at ACME/sakura next month

Yeah, that was me.

I need to pass gratitude to Andrew; I was a little worried when I glanced over to see that he had played Destiny against Hollie (not sure if that was his pick or random), but when we were matched up again for the finals, he did have the courtesy to ask if harder 10's would still be reasonable enough that I would neither hurt myself nor refuse to play.  Hand of Time was a great pick down that line - my bad knee wasn't any worse for it, but after so many consecutive rounds, my other leg was just too sore to hit the runs accurately in that song, which is something that would happen to anyone after playing enough.  It could have easily been the case that I just skipped the song and we went onto the tiebreaker if he hadn't asked, and I am definitely thankful for that.

The last few rounds of the standard bracket were extremely close overall, there were a lot of very tense matches all around.  Overall, there's definitely less of a spread between the standard bracket players than there would have been in past events - while there weren't any cases of both players nearly quadding the song or anything, almost every match ended in a tiebreaker and those tiebreaker usually ended with pretty small margins; it's definitely reassuring to see that things have balanced out a lot from past tournaments.

No offense to Keby, but extended the Expert bracket to 7 explicitly for Keby's benefit is a bit of a weird move (had the explicit reason been "with 15 players, bringing Keby up with make an 8 player standard bracket, which is cleaner" I could have accepted that, but day-off rule changes in general are always a little awkward).  It had been cited multiple times that the proper players would make their way into that bracket, and no one improper did, it's just that 7 players of sufficient skill came.  And even then, I don't believe Hollie's score was too far below Keby's, and mine was pretty close after that.

I definitely do not think we need to force the separation in the future, because the line was very difficult to blur; other than the frequency of 12's and 13's being far beyond what I could keep up with, watching the expert bracket did make me ask "why am I not there?" - I probably would have won no more than one or two songs against the pool of expert players (and even then, mostly by clever song choices), but my scores, even on 12's don't lag that much behind what I saw. If it had been a single 16 player double elim bracket, I still would have played for almost as long and would have been knocked out by one of the expert players after sitting in the loser's bracket for a few rounds, and that really doesn't matter to me because it still would have been fun, and short of players spamming 12's charts on me, I would have at least kept up.

After than the first round of the larger bracket (bottom 8 vs. top 8 ), you have an expert-standard split, and then more players are dropped into the loser's bracket in a fairly balanced order - it does a good job maintaining the same split that we had set out to achieve and always has.  The concern had been unnecessarily harsh stamina picks on players who can't play songs that hard, and the standard bracket rules only did a little to account for that, with players' choices doing a better job compensating than the rules did.  Since we've now proven that the players can be courteous to one another, we can address the fact that multiple people refused to enter because they had been insistent on capping at 11's instead of 12's, and then no 12's were played despite the cries of others.  If people can just settle on the idea of "it's okay if both players agree" or similar, then we won't be excluding that handful of players while still allowing 12's for the matches where they actually have any place coming up (which is not always synonymous with "late rounds").

Actually, I'll jump in with an idea Laura told me yesterday, while I'm at it.  If we must keep the two division setup, don't do it by qualifier and leave the value judgments out of it.

Run an 8-11 bracket and a 9-13 bracket, only allow entry into one (but by player's choice, set all other rules (entry fees, prize distribution percentages, everything) exactly the same (probably use different qualifiers between them).  Players enter the one they think will be more interesting to them; they might not work out to be the same size in the end, but that's because players have differing preferences.  Laura, Sara, and Suko are likely to enter the 8-11 bracket, as am I, Hollie, and possibly a few of the expert bracket players (especially given the sheer number of walk-offs that happened - the expert bracket honestly did not look that fun to me) and I know many players that were in the standard bracket would likely prefer the higher caps.  Sure, there's no single best player in the end, but there will be fierce competition in both brackets - as stated, the top players from the standard bracket would have had trouble in the expert bracket, but we are not so far removed in skill that it would have been pointless to try.  Since everything is exactly the same except the caps and qualifier, there's none of this "I play 13's therefore I'm better than you" sentiment in it - you enter the event that sounds like more fun to you.  Past opt-in divisions like this had failed mostly because the lower brackets were meant for players who were still learning to play, therefore a player from a higher division was guaranteed to win if they entered a lower division (and this always happened), but we are not in that situation anymore - we're heavily talking about players' preferences having a heavy split nowadays; I'd be interested to see a no-stakes exhibition match between the two division winners on, say, the 9-12 range, actually - I don't think you'd be able to reliably call it.

The two brackets can either be run entirely separately (e.g. one at 11am and one scheduled for 3:30pm) or the matches can be weaved together by alternating which bracket currently has a match after each match (with roughly equal entrant pools, this works out very cleanly and helps with the problem I ran into when I was up for the next 4 ITG matches and the next 2 DDR matches, since you cannot have two consecutive matches involving the same player when you weave them together).

NOTE: The difficulty ranges I've listed are there for the sake of concrete examples - there's no reason to argue about them right now, so don't.  The important bit is the idea - difficulty ranges and available song packs are implementation details that can be handled later.  The idea applies even if the two divisions are the Hustle Beach division and the Dragonforce division - the emphasis is that players can enter the event they would prefer to enter, without any attempt to say one division is somehow more important than the other.  If the two divisions were sufficiently distinct, it could even be appropriate to allow players to enter both if they so choose - the core debates were over statements of "I want to be able to play X" and "I don't want to have to play Y" that were not reconciled well, so players who can handle the full range of both should be free to attempt it if they so choose, it's just that if the ranges are almost identical, the pair of events emphasizes the overlap charts too much to be free from value judgments regarding different skill sets.

So, what was the headcount of this event? i.e How many people entered?

Also, who were the winners?

I can at least answer the questions about the DDR tournament.

There were 10 entrants in the DDR tournament, and the results were:

1st Place: James (manyminimoos)
2nd Place: Kevin (KevinDDR)
3rd Place: Allan (Gerrak)

I have a spreadsheet of the all the matches, including song choices and scores.  I'll be cleaning it up and posting it here sometime today.  There were definitely some really close matches, and I'm sad the DDR tournament didn't get more attention.  (But I guess walk-offs are fun to watch too =p)

ITG had 15 Entrants total.

Standard finished with
1. Me
2. Andrew (not sure of forum name or if he's even on the forums)
3. Hollie
4. sfzazure
5/6. Nimm and... I can't remember, it's whoever sfzazure played right before me (I want to say Dr. Z, but I just don't remember)
Very few 11's and no 12's were chosen (admittedly, 12's were allowed for like 3 matches total) - I played one 11 all day, and it was a random tiebreaker.  Almost every match I watched/played in went to a tiebreaker, and they were often pretty close.

I hear that Expert finished with
1. Gerrak
2. James (godai/minimoos/crackoon/whatever)
3. Rudo
with NSXX, ddrcoder, Keby, and KDDR filling out the other four spots (one spot was added on the spot pulling Keby, the 7th seed, into the Expert division and making the awkward 9-man standard bracket into a cleaner 8-man bracket).

I don't think I've had this much fun PREPARING for a tournament as I had this one, mostly because I just never play anymore and Alan... and many others, actually, being pretty even in skill with me sparked some competitive flame in me.  I didn't really try to practice songs to pick at the tourney, I just spent more time than usual at acme chatting with people who would show up at the tournament.  I'm surprised that I placed so well, but at the same time I'm not; anybody in the expert division could have gotten top 3 with the right roll of the dice.  Met a new face or two, which is always fun

Not a lot of constructive criticism for the tourney, it was fine.  I think one division would work just fine for many reasons; one main one being what Tony said; if there's a half and half type disparity, the first round takes care of it, and the potential for upsets makes things interesting, not to mention it gives people a chance to cross over in the other division, so to say, without ACTUALLY doing it.  I do disagree with making expert 7 people last minute, but I kinda justified it within myself by saying that an 8 man standard bracket was simply cleaner.  Last minute rule changes though, no good.

Too bad UW lost to UNC though.  That was lame even though I was the only one that cared, haha.

I said it there and on facebook but I'll say it again, that I'm just donating my winnings plus some to Disaster Relief in Japan.  Probably via Red Cross.  I have a bunch of family and friends over there affected to some degree, so it's near and dear to me.  

PS: I love the overuse of single words, run-on sentences, and the misuse of semi colons.  I won't fix it though (the second semi colon in the run on sentence should be a real colon)

I'd also like to mention at this time that the 25% of the tournament entry fees will be going to disaster relief in Japan (again likely through Red Cross) instead of the fund that Sleep Country's event is sponsoring. If anyone has any complaints about this, please let me know within the next 24 hours.

My vids from the tournament have been uploaded to youtube Link~

And here are a couple pictures:
Entrance view
Back of the arcade view

Thanks for taking so many videos! It's awesome to be able to go back and watch the matches.